Broken Spirits
by Ananke
Summary: Someone watches Rose at the Santa Monica pier, circa 1920. A memoir.


I had never hoped to see her in the flesh again, and yet somehow the sight of her did not surprise me.   
  
Eight years had passed since the demise of the Titanic...countless sunrises and sunsets rising and falling, countless, myriad sketches drawn against the Santa Monica Pier, all blended together into one stark mural...the mural by which I had come to measure my life. Strange how, in nearly three decades, an eternity to a broken soul, I've accomplished so little. I could have gone far, people have told me...a lad with my talent and charisma...could've gone far...indeed. I've survived. After that night, survival seems to be an accomplishment in itself. I've never been a person for the material articles of life...social appearances to the contrary...rough and tumble suits me as well as anything else. For years after the sinking of the great Titanic, I wondered…would it have suited her? Did it suit her? Was she out there, scraping out a bare existence beneath the same stars I stared at each night...was she happy, healthy? Questions I asked myself often enough over the years, and never sought to answer. What if I had sought...would it, could it have been different?  
  
No. The angry answer lashed back through the recesses of my numb soul then, and continues to echo now. I had done the right thing that April, turning my back on New York City and the name scratched on the survivor list. Rose Dawson. Rose. Somehow, after weeks spent recovering from hypothermia, shock, pneumonia...in the hospital, surrounded by newspapers and survivors lists, I had stared long and hard at that name....and convinced myself, albeit halfheartedly, that I had to move on. Without Rose.   
  
After I had come to that cold conclusion, the glory and seemingly infinite beauty of those days we were together seemed much further away, and reality...the realities of the naivety and childish recklessness of our affair, the eventual miseries, seemed stark, unbending. For, at least in my mind, if not heart, that was how I forced myself to see our relationship...a social arrangement that could have happened anywhere, with anyone. At the time of our courtship and eventual engagement, I had been adrift in my own uncertainties, callous in my insecurities...and she a passionate, lonely, fiery girl verging on womanhood, frightened by nothing and no one.   
  
Brief years later, nothing had changed.  
  
I crumbled the survivor's lists and gave Rose Dewitt Bukater a funeral Philadelphia society whispered of for years. God knows, in those days I wasn't exactly fervent for another fist fight with fate. I moved on. I survived. In time, after a few years, I even forgot the details of her face, the intimacies of her body, and flung the last, formally sterile portraits I had commissioned of her into the ocean, with the memories. Yes, I survived. Until April 15, 1920.  
  
The pier at Santa Monica was quiet, but by no means empty...the typical evening crowd of lovers and anniversary couples filtering in for a glimpse of the always extraordinarily beautiful sunset, their conversations whispered and shy, marred only by the occasional laughter or shrill cry of a child. It was a scene I had watched and sketched many times, but that evening the familiar drawing urge wasn't present. Tired, feeling the sorrow of the sinking's anniversary more than ever before, I had stretched out on a bench, absently listening to the gulls and squinting at a few early stars. The piers had become my home...a haunt where my most treasured sketches were created, where my memories could be washed away with the tides. Strange how I took such a interest in art...it symbolized everything threatening to my former existence...in Rose's case, freedom and rebellion, spirit, fire...and, of course...Jack Dawson. I can still recall the most precise details of that drawing...even when every other memory of Rose is gone into the misty recesses of my inner mind. It still infuriates me, though the anger is now tempered by rather amused resignation. Only Rose would have dared flaunt me in quite that way. I deserved it. And I have no doubt Jack Dawson got more than he could have hoped to handle.  
  
And lost far more than he could ever have thought possible. Poor, reckless boy.  
  
I remain uncertain just what it was that pulled my attention away from the crowds and my artistry…the fading sunlight, perhaps, glinting on her hair…lighter, bleached by hours outdoors and fewer treatments…but nonetheless Rose. Her laughter followed immediately after the sighting, broken by protests and shrieks as her companion…a man, with pale blond hair and a Bohemian's grace…pulled her towards the beach. Horse rides, I realized, the 'penny for a ride astride' variety.  
  
I found myself standing, dropping my papers and charcoal, watching the noisy, spirited tableau as it unfolded. He pressed money into the gypsy booth owner's hands, swinging his hands about her waist with excruciating familiarity, tossing her up on the saddle with ease. She laughed, shouting and grabbing for the reins as he backed away and grabbed a camera from a nearby bench.  
  
Grinning in return, he readied the camera, tones rising and falling in song, alternately earning embarrassed glares and posturing smiles from her. The song still echoes in my head to this day…a long-time favorite of hers, I recall, she would play the thing on the gramophone for hours on end after a particularly acrid exchange with her mother…or myself.  
  
Hose! Let Us Fly, Dear!  
Where, Kid?  
To The Sky Dear!  
Oh, You Flying Machine!  
Jump In, Miss Josephine!  
Ship Ahoy!  
Oh, Joy! What A Feeling!  
Feels Cold, Thru The Ceiling! Ho, High!  
Hoopla, We Fly! To The Sky So High!  
  
Come Josephine, In My Flying Machine,  
Going Up She Goes, Up She Goes!  
Balance Yourself Like A Bird On A Beam  
In The Air She Goes, There She Goes  
Up, Up A Little Bit Higher!  
Oh, My! The Moon Is On Fire!  
Come Josephine In My Flying Machine  
Going Up, All On "Goodbye"  
  
One, Two, Now We're Off Dear!  
Oh, You, Pretty Soft Dear!  
Whoa! Say! Don't Hit The Moon!  
Oh, No, Not Yet But Soon! You For Me!  
Oh, Gee! You're A Fly, Kid!  
Not Me, I'm A Sky Kid!  
Gee! I'm Up In The Air About You For Fair!  
  
Moments later, photographs taken, he thrust more coins into the horse owner's hands, waving her off down the beach with one hand, smacking the horse on the rump with the other. She shrieked again, but quickly fell into rhythm with the beast, flying off through the surf, scattering crowds of people and birds alike.   
  
I stood as if paralyzed, not yards from her fun-loving companion, watching as she paced the horse to and fro until darkness threatened to overtake the sand. Her eventual return and dismounting were reluctant, but in the lamplight her face shone with content as I'd never seen on it before. Looking relaxed and completely natural in the men's riding outfit she wore, Rose struggled briefly with the falling strands of golden red hair, finally declaring them lost and letting the mane tumble free. Her friend laughed again, slipping an arm over her shoulder and swinging the camera strap over his own as they made their way up the pier. Stepping back, I bent to retrieve my portfolio, half hoping to avoid her glance, half praying that she would take interest in the drawings scattered about and pause.  
  
In the end, it wasn't my etched out horizon that she faced, but the Pacific. She and he stood silently by the rails for long moments. It amazed me long ago, and amazes me now, how completely her moods can alter from one moment to the next…celebratory boat flares sounded in the distance and I watched as the joy drained from her eyes and almost naked pain flickered across her face, followed by a low, swiftly buried sob. Finally, she allowed her companion to gently draw her away from the rail, with a shaky smile, and they walked off hand in hand. It would be the last I would ever see of her…I came back to the pier almost obsessively after that anniversary evening, of course, but they were never to be seen again…actors, the booth owners commiserated…provided the best business and left town the next day. Indeed, I found playbills thrown haphazardly under the benches…Jules Calvert and his new leading lady, the glorious Rose Dawson. It seemed that they got along just as well in work as in play. Even now, resources say, they have the best of everything…comfortable careers, frequent travel, two children, a happy marriage, little to interfere with their Bohemian lifestyle.  
  
April 15, 1929. It was the last anniversary I witnessed, and the last I intend to witness. Seventeen years, as many as Rose Dewitt Bukater was old when she died and Rose Dawson to become Rose Calvert was born.  
  
At times, when my daughters lie sprawled across their bed in innocent dreams, I find myself replacing their faces with those of a beautiful young woman I once loved and of another child, another little girl that Caledon Hockley used and left to die in a filthy orphanage…another of Titanic's ghosts. At times I see Rose's angry rebellion in my fourteen year old's gaze, and my youngest…at times she reminds me of my little crying girl from Titanic, her weeping echoes even through the cold walls of this Hockley manse, and at times I think…I think that it is time to join her in whatever purgatory she calls to me from.  
  
Soon, she says.   
  
Soon, I say.  
  
Caledon Hockley, private memoirs, October 29th, 1929. 


End file.
